FLORENTINO Perez had a contented smile on his face, and with good reason. He had just watched Spain and Brazil share a thrilling, freewheeling draw at the stadium he has expensively, lavishly, reappointed.
Now, Perez, Real Madrid’s all-powerful president, found himself in a whitewashed tunnel, presented – completely by chance, obviously – with his favourite kind of photo opportunity.
To one side stood Vinicius Junior, Real’s standard-bearer and main event, dutifully introducing the man who pays his wages to his Brazil teammates.
A little farther along the corridor, hurrying to pay obeisance, was Rodrygo, another of Perez’s employees.
But Perez’s focus was on Endrick, the 17-year-old star-in-waiting who will complete his long-awaited move to the Bernabeu this summer.
To say the two of them shared a conversation would be pushing it: In footage of their brief meeting, Endrick does not appear to speak.
After a handshake, Perez utters only one line, but it is perfect.
“We’re waiting for you here,” he said.
Real has had Endrick lined up for some time: The club announced that they had reached an agreement to sign him from Palmeiras three days before the final of the 2022 World Cup. He would, as FIFA’s rules dictate, remain in Brazil, with the club that have sculpted him into the most coveted prospect in world soccer, until he turns 18 this July.
That kind of long-term planning feels just a little out of step with Real Madrid’s traditional modus operandi.
The club identifies, correctly, as a titan, and – under Perez’s stewardship, in particular – they have taken great pride in living the values associated with the classical definition of that term: impetuous, impulsive, irascible.
They fire coaches for failing to win the Champions League, sign players on the back of a stellar World Cup and air a regular feature on their in-house television channel that has been interpreted as a preemptive attempt to influence and/or intimidate referees. Real Madrid have always been the sort of place that eat their own sons.
All of that remains hard-wired into the club’s fibres. In the past three years, Perez has not only helped to concoct a Super League that was intended to reshape world football more to his liking, but defended it on a gaudy late-night talk show – a little like going on “Judge Judy” to announce the abolition of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – and then continued to promote it even after it was savaged by, well, just about everyone else.
But there is little question that there is something different about the current incarnation of Real Madrid.
The club have always regarded themselves as being the biggest, most powerful, most glamorous, most famous team not just in football, but in sports as a whole.
Now, it is possible to make the case that they should be regarded as the best run, too.
Real signed up Jude Bellingham to the disappointment of English clubs.
Their mildly absurd record in the Champions League bears that out.
In the last decade, they have won the tournament the club cherishes most five times. Should Carlo Ancelotti’s team fall to Manchester City over the next two weeks, it would mark only the third time since 2010 that Real Madrid have not reached at least the semi-finals of Europe’s showpiece competition.
A better gauge, though, is what will happen this summer.
As well as Endrick, already anointed as the finest player of football’s new generation, Real Madrid are expected (at last) to sign Kylian Mbappe, the standout of the current one.
They should be joined, too, by Alphonso Davies, the Bayern Munich and Canada leftback.
All three deals showcase how adroitly Real Madrid now navigate the transfer market. Endrick is another special from Juni Calafat, the club’s recruitment chief, who has long been tasked with bringing the brightest prospects from around the world – and from South America in particular – to Madrid.
Mbappe has been a case study in patience, with Real Madrid by turns seducing the player and biding their time, slowly and carefully positioning themselves as his only realistic route out of Paris St Germain, waiting until the economic conditions were right to sign a player currently employed by a club that is in effect an arm of a nation state.
On Real’s radar: Bayern Munich’s Alphonso Davies (red) and PSG’s Kylian Mbappe (right).
Davies, too, is a masterpiece of patience: Real Madrid will present Bayern Munich with the choice of losing him for a fee this summer, or for nothing when his contract expires in 2025.
Bayern will resent it, of course. But it is familiar enough with that sort of strong-arm method that they might privately applaud just a little, too.
It would not be the first club to admire – however begrudgingly – how well Real Madrid have adapted to a financial landscape that, as the Super League project demonstrated, seemed to have shifted against Europe’s old aristocrats.
Real Madrid do not have the money to bully Premier League teams into selling players, and so instead they signed Antonio Rudiger from Chelsea on a free transfer.
They retain an impressively productive academy – according to the analysis firm CIES, 97 of their graduates are playing professionally in Europe – but have also moved quickly to gobble up players such as Eduardo Camavinga, Jude Bellingham and Aurelien Tchouameni before they fall into English clutches.
The result is a club that, almost alone among the grand old teams of the Continent, can look to the future with relish.
Barcelona have mortgaged many tomorrows to pay for the sins of yesterday. Bayern Munich are about to hire their fourth coach in three years.
Juventus are still reeling from the mass resignation of their board in 2022 amid allegations of fraudulent accounting.
Real Madrid, on the other hand, should next season be able to name a midfield of Camavinga, Tchouameni and Bellingham, and a forward line of Rodrygo, Vinicius and Endrick.
Quite where Federico Valverde fits in is anyone’s guess. It certainly does not feel like the club’s destiny rests on whatever Mbappe decides to do.
It may, in many ways, remain an old-fashioned club, run as a personal fief by an omnipotent president.
It does not pretend to be as data-driven, as avowedly modern, as Manchester City or Liverpool or Brighton, and it most definitely does not, at any point, feel any need whatsoever to tell anyone how clever it is.
But it is difficult to escape the impression that of all the game’s traditional elite, Real Madrid are now the one that need a Super League the least.
It is true that this is not the reality Perez hoped to occupy in the spring of 2024. He wanted it to change, irrevocably, to suit his club.
The converse, though, seems to have worked just as well. He has his modern stadium. He has his cluster of stars.
The world remains, as it always was, much to Real Madrid’s liking. — NYT
